Culture

[Bluto]

I'll tell you one thing. You can tap dance with the best of them.

Thanks...I think...lol.

 

[Irish YJ]

An approach where one skillfully maneuvers to avoid direct answers.

 

[Wild Bill]

https://twitter.com/HuffPost/status/1012723617405292545?s=19

It's hard keeping up with all this progress.

 

[Irish YJ]

https://twitter.com/HuffPost/status/1012723617405292545?s=19

It's hard keeping up with all this progress.

I'm not often shocked...
I'm sure this is politically correct now, right?

This shit is really sad.

 

[zelezo vlk]

I agree with all this. Go look at a restaurant or anywhere and see everybody staring at their phones. Parents hand their children a tablet/phone just to get them to shut up. Bo Burnham's upcoming movie, Eighth Grade, supposedly highlights the problems of ubiquitous exposure to the Internet for teens. It might be a good thing for you fathers to watch

Matt Walther's The quiet destruction of the American teenager

In the United States, one in four teenage girls have cut or burned or otherwise harmed themselves deliberately, according to findings from sociologists reported recently in The New York Times.

This statistic cannot be stage-managed. It is a stark, unignorable indictment of this country and the way that we are raising our children. It is not a state of affairs that can be explained away. A quarter of American girls, with no intention of committing suicide, mutilate themselves.

We must ask ourselves how things came to be this way and what we can do to make ours a world in which young people are not miserable.


It is important to begin by observing that although the number of boys engaging in this behavior is also alarmingly high — the national average for boys and girls combined is around 18 percent — in all but two states the percentage of girls who have injured themselves is double that of boys. The sexual disparity is unmistakable.

The problem is hardly a new one. For years researchers observed that the rate of self-harm among girls between the ages of 10 and 14 was increasing rapidly. Last fall the Centers for Disease Control, drawing upon emergency room admissions data, reported that it had tripled since 2009.

It seems facile to suggest that there is any single overarching explanation for this phenomenon. But Jean M Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has argued that economic uncertainty and other economic factors, the demands of education, and the use alcohol and drugs do not account for the meteoric increase. The answer she proposes is the use of smartphones and social media.

Few periods in American history have been as revolutionary as the last decade or so. Between 2009 and the present the use of smartphones has become ubiquitous among children. It is not uncommon for many young people to spend six or even nine hours a day in front of these screens, getting less sleep, spending less time engaged in other meaningful activities, engrossing themselves in a set of priorities and commitments that are utterly divorced from the real world in which they should be learning to live.

Nor, I think, is it especially helpful for children to communicate with one another at such extraordinary length in almost exclusively adult-free spaces. When I was an adolescent, getting in touch with a friend meant calling the other person's house, where it was likely that a parent or an older sibling would answer the phone. Sometimes you would have to exchange pleasantries about the weather with your best friend's mother before she would hand over the phone.

This was a better state of affairs, I think, for both children and parents: for the former because it helped them to learn what it was like to talk to adults other than one's own parents, and for the latter because it is good to have some idea of what your child is up to and when and with whom. Moreover, the time children spent engaged in impersonal communication was strictly delineated because other people had to use the same phone. This also applied to computers and dial-up internet in the days of those beige and black boxes, when AOL Instant Messenger was not an option at 1 a.m. because of the unholy screech made by the modem dialing in the living room.

Hell is not, strictly speaking, other people. But for a teenage girl, nine hours a day of other people evaluating your appearance and utterances as you attempt to negotiate their preferences and attitudes and jockey for some intangible sense of status is probably something very much like hell. Studies by Twenge and others have shown that depression is far more likely to be correlated with frequent social media use among girls than with boys, who in any case are more likely to use their devices to play video games. The first person I ever knew who "cut" was also the first acquaintance of mine to use a social media service of any kind (LiveJournal); she had gotten the idea from a YA novel called Cut, a lurid and almost romanticizing treatment of self-harm whose publication can only be defended as a kind of misguided attempts at raising awareness of a problem that has grown exponentially worse since it appeared in 2002.

Most adults do not have the luxury of deciding whether the way we live now is healthy. If you use a computer at work and your employer insists on being able to contact you at all hours, you have no choice but to keep your smartphone near you. This is not the case for children. There is no reason that a child at 10 — the average age at which an American now receives his or her own smartphone — needs to own one of these devices. The downside of waiting to give children these powerful tools designed for adults until they are emotionally mature enough to handle them is practically nil; the upside is, or should be, self-evident.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

NRO's Michael Brendan Dougherty just published an article titled "America's Social Treasury is Depleting":

There is a paradox afflicting our politics. It’s the thing I emphasize every time I’m invited to speak with a grandee in the political or business world. It’s the contrast between increasing standards of living and increased social anxiety and unhappiness. You notice it in the headlines every day. By the normal measures, the economy is roaring. Unemployment continues to dive. Wages are starting to creep up. The market is frothing. And yet as all these trends have gone in the right direction. your friends and neighbors insist that things are getting worse in America.

The U.S. keeps slipping in rankings of its self-reported happiness. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which is a United Nations initiative, explained the slide in rankings by noting that “social support networks in the U.S. have weakened over time.”

Because our age has a congenital aversion to statements about society that are untethered to statistics, here are a few. Marriage has declined rapidly in our lifetime. In 2000, 55 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds were married. Only 34 percent were never married. In the last few years, never-marrieds are getting close to overtaking married people in the population. The average number of people per household has shrunk from 3.33 to 2.57 since 1960. That doesn’t seem like much, but multiply it across an entire kin network and the effect is a dramatic shrinking of the number of people to whom you give, and from whom you expect, some familial loyalty and socializing.

Other surveys show massive increases in loneliness, with progressive generational declines in the art of friendship. On average, Americans have one fewer close friend today than a generation ago. Many men report having no close friendships. The youngest Americans, the ones using social media the most, are socializing the least “irl.”

Despite America’s reputation as the Western world’s most God-bothering nation, church attendance has been consistently dropping over our lifetimes. Barna now estimates that the population of “unchurched” people, 43 percent, has exceeded the population of active churchgoers.

One of the happiest and most upwardly mobile cities is Salt Lake City, Utah. This isn’t entirely shocking, because it has a hardy, respected religious institution at its heart, and the culture of Utah is infused with the spirit created by a coherent religious culture that nonetheless has the solidarity of a minority faith in its country. In more-reliable estimates, Salt Lake City is basically tied with Chattanooga for the country’s most churched city. On a basic sociological level, you might expect people who gather together week after week, and read passages about their duties to one another as brothers and sisters in faith, may have access to emotional and spiritual resources that arm them against America’s new trends of loneliness and disconnectedness.

Along with declines in the number of people hearing the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” there is a predictable decline in neighborliness itself. Fewer Americans know their next-door neighbors. Fewer still regularly interact with them. Personally, this is the change I’ve noticed most in my own life. On a larger level, there are declines in everyday charity and philanthropy, and declines in civic and ethnic organizations.

When I talk to people, I refer to these trends as the depletion and disappearance of a social treasury. GDP goes up. Incomes sometimes go up. Real wages tick up. But, at a basic level, people live in a world where fewer and fewer people owe them consideration, compassion, favors, tips for getting ahead in a career, or consolation for getting through life’s disasters.

This is the background noise behind our politics today. And it is unsurprising that the two insurgent ideological trends on the left and on the right — socialism and nationalism, respectively — emphasize shared burdens, our duties to one another.

It’s easy to see how the depletion of the social treasure informs the politics of the Right’s populists. It explains some of the contrast between the feelings of precarity that Trump voters report and the income stats that suggest they may be doing just fine, or better. And it partly explains the upsurge in socialism, as well.

But one of the under-remarked things is that America’s elites are not immune from these trends either. They may have the wherewithal, the talents, and the preexisting social capital to successfully navigate a world in which their communal life has been almost entirely displaced by a networking life. For a while, they often succeed more when liberated from a life that would impose obligations. They throw themselves more fully into careers and social milieux that run on a more disguised form of conditional favor-trading, rather than reciprocal duties.

But it is precisely because they see so clearly how much their outcomes in life depend on the favors they put into and extract out of a network, that they dread their loss of status which they value most keenly. While leisure hasn’t entirely died among American elites, they constantly betray themselves as overworked and under-cultivated.

The decline of the social treasury is not easily amenable by political policy. Until Utah senator Mike Lee used his position on the Joint Economic Committee to pioneer a social-capital index, it was barely visible to them.

But because politics has become one of the only arenas in which Americans can collectively discuss the quality of their social relations and their sense of morality, politicians will at least have to learn to address an America that is wealthier and lonelier, that has higher standards of living but lives marked by quiet desperation, that works hard but doesn’t know why anymore.

 

[Irish YJ]

North Carolina mom warns of popular 'Roblox' video game after 7-year-old's avatar 'violently gang raped' | Fox News

 

[Irish#1]

I agree with all this. Go look at a restaurant or anywhere and see everybody staring at their phones. Parents hand their children a tablet/phone just to get them to shut up. Bo Burnham's upcoming movie, Eighth Grade, supposedly highlights the problems of ubiquitous exposure to the Internet for teens. It might be a good thing for you fathers to watch

Matt Walther's The quiet destruction of the American teenager

There are times I'm glad smartphones didn't arrive until after our kids had grown up.

 

[NorthDakota]

There are times I'm glad smartphones didn't arrive until after our kids had grown up.

I'm guilty of being on my phone far too much. But I'm very grateful I grew up in the last group of kids who didn't have smartphones/tablets.

 

[ickythump1225]

I'm guilty of being on my phone far too much. But I'm very grateful I grew up in the last group of kids who didn't have smartphones/tablets.

Yeah me too. I had a company issued phone with my last gig but since I've moved to a new job without a phone I'm not married to it. I feel a lot better. I used to just sit on the phone everywhere. I currently have a TracFone and I'm fine with it. When I go out to eat for instance and wait for my food I don't immediately bust a phone out and veg out. Besides, modern smartphones are just miniature spy machines. I don't trust that shit. I lol@ civil libertarian ex-hippie boomers who took to the streets to protest government overreach, the Vietnam War, and "Big Brother" and now have Alexa and SmartHome technology so they can be spied on anytime anyone feels like it. The PATRIOT Act is government overreach (I actually agree with that) but smartphones, web cams, Google home, etc. are all fine.

 

[Bishop2b5]

There are times I'm glad smartphones didn't arrive until after our kids had grown up.

I've always banned my kids from having their phone at the dinner table or during family time. Taking an important call is one thing, but they were never allowed to just text, surf or play on them and ignore everyone else around them. My step-daughter was pretty addicted and we butted heads several times over her spending family time, dinner, or trips in the car on her phone nonstop and not engaging with her family. I paid for most of her phone and all of her service so insisted I had the right to tell her to put it away, have some manners and interact with her family. She said she'd just get her dad to put her on his phone plan. That was a fun conversation that lasted about 60 seconds and ended with him telling her I was right, he'd be even stricter, then laughing and hanging up.

In a related story: when she was 14, I grounded her for a week. She thought I was being unfair and decided to call her dad and get him to override me (her dad & I have always been 100% on the same page concerning the kids and I knew this wasn't going to go well for her). After she pled her case to him over the phone (on speaker with me in the room) he replied, "Well, you're right. He shouldn't have grounded you for a week for that. He should've grounded you for TWO weeks! I can't change his punishment, but I can add an extra week for trying to play us against each other. Love you... bye!" Click. LOL

 

[Irish#1]

I've always banned my kids from having their phone at the dinner table or during family time. Taking an important call is one thing, but they were never allowed to just text, surf or play on them and ignore everyone else around them. My step-daughter was pretty addicted and we butted heads several times over her spending family time, dinner, or trips in the car on her phone nonstop and not engaging with her family. I paid for most of her phone and all of her service so insisted I had the right to tell her to put it away, have some manners and interact with her family. She said she'd just get her dad to put her on his phone plan. That was a fun conversation that lasted about 60 seconds and ended with him telling her I was right, he'd be even stricter, then laughing and hanging up.

In a related story: when she was 14, I grounded her for a week. She thought I was being unfair and decided to call her dad and get him to override me (her dad & I have always been 100% on the same page concerning the kids and I knew this wasn't going to go well for her). After she pled her case to him over the phone (on speaker with me in the room) he replied, "Well, you're right. He shouldn't have grounded you for a week for that. He should've grounded you for TWO weeks! I can't change his punishment, but I can add an extra week for trying to play us against each other. Love you... bye!" Click. LOL

Raising step kids can't be easy. Especially when you weren't involved when they were 1 or 2 years old where they see you as dad.

 

[wizards8507]

North Carolina mom warns of popular 'Roblox' video game after 7-year-old's avatar 'violently gang raped' | Fox News

What an idiot. On the spectrum of technology that a 7-year-old should be allowed to use, "online multiplayer video game" is at the extreme end of never-in-a-million-years.

 

[ickythump1225]

My oldest is 9 and starting to become aware of phones, games, messaging, etc. We allow her to use my wife's old iPod to use kids messenger on FB to talk to my wife's family. She has discovered some games (shark games, horse simulator, etc) but we realized they have a chat feature so we have to monitor that very closely. Technology is such a double edged sword.

 

[Irish YJ]

What an idiot. On the spectrum of technology that a 7-year-old should be allowed to use, "online multiplayer video game" is at the extreme end of never-in-a-million-years.

Agree, but gang rape is on the extreme end of never in a million years should be allowed in widely available game either.

 

[IrishLax]

My oldest is 9 and starting to become aware of phones, games, messaging, etc. We allow her to use my wife's old iPod to use kids messenger on FB to talk to my wife's family. She has discovered some games (shark games, horse simulator, etc) but we realized they have a chat feature so we have to monitor that very closely. Technology is such a double edged sword.

Many people that work in tech send their kids to low-tech or no-tech schools. There are some crazy studies out there that basically make it sound like social media and/or tech immersion in general is REALLY BAD for most human brains.

 

[zelezo vlk]

.

 

[Bishop2b5]

Yesterday, daughter #2 reminded me of something from years ago when she was in middle school. One of her classmates came from a relatively wealthy family. At 14 she and her mom had already gone on several flights to NYC just to shop, she'd been to Europe a few times and to Hawaii and Tahiti. Her parents indulged her and bought her anything she wanted, and had promised her an $80k car for her 16th b'day.

If I won the lottery and had hundreds of millions of dollars I wouldn't buy my 16-year-old an expensive car or lavish them with such unearned riches. It kills their incentive to work hard to earn such things for themselves, spoils them, and leaves them with little to look forward to later in life. I like the Gene Simmons approach with Nick: "Yes, you can have a Ferrari. Go work as hard as I did for 20 years and buy one."

 

[Irish YJ]

Yesterday, daughter #2 reminded me of something from years ago when she was in middle school. One of her classmates came from a relatively wealthy family. At 14 she and her mom had already gone on several flights to NYC just to shop, she'd been to Europe a few times and to Hawaii and Tahiti. Her parents indulged her and bought her anything she wanted, and had promised her an $80k car for her 16th b'day.

If I won the lottery and had hundreds of millions of dollars I wouldn't buy my 16-year-old an expensive car or lavish them with such unearned riches. It kills their incentive to work hard to earn such things for themselves, spoils them, and leaves them with little to look forward to later in life. I like the Gene Simmons approach with Nick: "Yes, you can have a Ferrari. Go work as hard as I did for 20 years and buy one."

I probably wouldn't either, but I don't necessarily think a kid will be lazy if you give them shit. I know several families who spoil the shit out of their kids. Some are great, hard working kids, others lazy. I really believe it's how you raise them, not necessarily how much you give them. But no kid deserves a 80k car at 16. Perhaps a college graduation gift, but at 16, give them something used, fun, safe, not too fast, and under 20k lol.

 

[connor_in]

‘Who hurt you?’: Deputy editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune enters ratio hall of fame after ‘dogs are parasites’ hot take

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">who hurt you? <a href="https://t.co/zh7tqsrbO0">https://t.co/zh7tqsrbO0</a></p>— trey wingo (@wingoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/wingoz/status/1017366795601240064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 12, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[zelezo vlk]

That's ridiculous, dogs aren't parasites; arasites intentionally attack hosts. Humans are the instigators in the unhealthy obsession with dogs, not vice versa

 

[greyhammer90]

Dogs have been a hugely beneficial relationship for thousands of years. For essentially dinner scraps, humans got a watch guard that could see in the dark and alert them, pushing/pulling labor, hunting/tracking abilities, and companionship.

 

[Rack Em]

Dogs have been a hugely beneficial relationship for thousands of years. For essentially dinner scraps, humans got a watch guard that could see in the dark and alert them, pushing/pulling labor, hunting/tracking abilities, and companionship.

And dog shit on the floor

 

[ACamp1900]

Ha, wow... Never a nice thing to be had...

Anyway, it's often amazed me to think how our species has forged this understanding with dogs and cats (obviously other species but those two especially)... I'm prone to ramble about it with my wife when we are just sitting around with our bulldog and tabby.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

That's ridiculous, dogs aren't parasites; arasites intentionally attack hosts. Humans are the instigators in the unhealthy obsession with dogs, not vice versa

Yes. Most dogs are Very Good Boys™. The problem is with humans who have a disordered affection for beasts.

Then again, the symptoms of decadence haven't changed much over the centuries:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">—Plutarch, Pericles <a href="https://t.co/euKCwtFonk">pic.twitter.com/euKCwtFonk</a></p>— Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) <a href="https://twitter.com/NoTrueScotist/status/1004479151154139136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[greyhammer90]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">—Plutarch, Pericles <a href="https://t.co/euKCwtFonk">pic.twitter.com/euKCwtFonk</a></p>— Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) <a href="https://twitter.com/NoTrueScotist/status/1004479151154139136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

What an odd zero-sum game mindset for affection. Money? Sure, people who spend a ton of money on their dogs are weird. Time? Maybe, though people waste their time on much worse things in most "decadent" societies.

 

[Old Man Mike]

In a "culture" so broken of community as ours, it's the height of assholism and shortsightedness to blame animal companions for anything. Almost nothing except her family brought smiles and life to my Mom in her post-90 years than the arrival of a friendly dog. She would have loved that experience every day once she had to go to the nursing home for the last half year of her life.

If there is a problem in the Human/Dog relationship, it is that we humans are so self-centered that we don't consider some of THEIR needs --- like being outside and allowed to run.

 

[Irish#1]

Dogs have been a hugely beneficial relationship for thousands of years. For essentially dinner scraps, humans got a watch guard that could see in the dark and alert them, pushing/pulling labor, hunting/tracking abilities, and companionship.

You just described marriage!

 

[ACamp1900]

Costco is getting rid of their polish dogs... weep... for the culture.

 

[connor_in]

Yes. Most dogs are Very Good Boys™. The problem is with humans who have a disordered affection for beasts.

Then again, the symptoms of decadence haven't changed much over the centuries:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">—Plutarch, Pericles <a href="https://t.co/euKCwtFonk">pic.twitter.com/euKCwtFonk</a></p>— Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) <a href="https://twitter.com/NoTrueScotist/status/1004479151154139136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>